Memphis judge blisters rapist, MPD over rape-kit backlog

January 29 2014 - Jerald Jefferson looks on during his sentencing in Shelby County Criminal Court. Jefferson was sentenced to the maximum of 25 years in prison after being convicted of rape in Judge Lee Coffee's courtroom. (William DeShazer/The Commercial Appeal)

The Commercial Appeal

A judge offered tough words Wednesday for a convicted rapist and thousands of untested rape kits in the possession of Memphis police that allowed the defendant to "run the streets'' for more than a decade before he was finally identified and brought to justice.

"He took innocence from a child,'' Shelby County Criminal Court Judge Lee Coffee said of defendant Jerald Jefferson, 32, convicted last month of a cold-case rape in which he and two others abducted a 16-year-old student from the campus of Trezevant High School in 2002.

"Mr. Jefferson destroyed this lady's life.''

Coffee sentenced Jefferson to 25 years in prison, the maximum allowed at the time of the crime, a sentence the judge called "wholly inappropriate.''

Coffee also had harsh words for the Memphis Police Department and recent revelations that the agency has accumulated about 12,000 untested rape kits dating back to the 1970s.

A rape kit from the Jefferson case was tested two years after the crime through a federal grant, but a DNA profile wasn't uploaded to a federal database until 2006. Authorities finally identified the profile as Jefferson's in 2010 when he was arrested for assault.

"Hopefully, at some point we'll find the resources, we'll find the manpower, we'll find the commitment so that people like (the victim) are not abducted, raped at the age of 16, and it takes 11 years for the case to come to court,'' Coffee said from the bench.

As the victim, now 28, watched from the gallery, not 10 yards from the stone-faced defendant, the judge blistered Jefferson as well as MPD's handling of the case.

"He had this lady suffer for some 12 years before she was able to come to court and to get justice for what happened to her,'' Coffee said of Jefferson.

"She (the victim) told the jury that she believes that the female (officer) that originally investigated this case was so nonchalant and she believed that person did not believe her. And it took 11 years for (the victim's) day to come to court.''

The judge said he hopes MPD will "encourage the city of Memphis to find the funding so (victims) will not have to be tortured for a decade or longer waiting on justice because we have untested rape kits sitting in a property room that could be tested. And people like Mr. Jefferson that commit rapes in 2002 would not continue to run the streets of Shelby County, Tenn., putting more innocent folks at risk.''

Mayor A C Wharton and Police Director Toney Armstrong, neither of whom were in office during the critical years that the rape kit backlog grew, have received acclaim for plans to spend as much as $5 million or more in the coming years to test all the backlogged kits. Police currently are testing more than 2,200 kits through a $500,000 grant.

Authorities are still trying to piece together exactly how the backlog grew so large.